The best to be said for this tiresome exercise in magic realism is that it feels like a film the writer-director Cris Jones, an Australian making his first feature, may have needed to get out of his system.

The hero, Otto Bloom (Xavier Samuel), lives backwards in time - though not like the hero of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, who ages in reverse. What's unusual about him is not his appearance but his relation to experience: he remembers the future and has no knowledge of the past.

Resourcefully assembled on a low budget, the film is styled as a pseudo-documentary chronicling Bloom's rise to fame in the 1980s and subsequent downfall, with talking-head interviewees including with the psychologist Dr Ada Fitzgerald, ultimately the love of his life.

Fitzgerald is played in simulated archival footage by Matilda Brown, and in the present day by Brown's real-life mother Rachel Ward.

Given his strange condition, it's hard to see how Bloom manages to form relationships, or communicate at all: the question is addressed, but not very convincingly.

Other practical questions don't come up. How does Otto experience meals, or trips to the bathroom? He's supposed to be an artist, but from his standpoint, wouldn't this mean dismantling works that already exist?

What the film amounts to in practice is a guileless wish-fulfilment fantasy. Bloom is handsome, brilliant, wealthy and famous, with a singular destiny that sets him apart from the common run of humanity - as one of his girlfriends puts it, a "complex messiah".

Boldly - but unwisely - Jones commits himself to furnishing us with firsthand evidence of his hero's genius, including extracts from an inspirational New Age speech which, we're told, created a sensation worldwide.

On the other hand, the premise makes nonsense of any notion of cause and effect - which means that Bloom never has to take responsibility for anything, including his transitions from one woman to another.

It's Ward who effectively carries the film, to some degree bringing Fitzgerald's romance with Bloom to life.

Logically, there's no way she and Samuel can meet on screen, but there are moments when all the science-fiction gimmickry seems to mask another story entirely, about the "impossible" love between an older woman and a younger man (terrain which Samuel has already visited in Anne Fontaine's Adoration). At any rate, her rueful poise is far more than Otto Bloom deserves.